Tamil Nadu hits bull's eye

What happened to Jallikattu?

In May 2014, the Supreme Court of India, the highest judicial body in the land, imposed a ban on the sport, citing animal cruelty. The case was brought by the Animal Welfare Board and People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). The ban came into effect in 2015. In 2016, the state was hit by the worst floods in its history and there were no protests. This year, several groups of youngsters converged on Marina beach at Chennai to protest against the Supreme Court's verdict.

The issue is important because the sport helps keep native breeds alive. However, those against the sport argue that the bull is deliberately tortured before releasing it into the arena.

They had all come together through Whatsapp, Facebook and Twiter. As the movement gathered momentum, roads were choked, pressure was piled on the state and eventually after three days, an ordinance was passed allowing the sport to take place while the matter is discussed in parliament. The following analysis discusses people's activity on Twitter during three days of protest - Jan 18, 19 and 20.

Who were the top tweeters?

The top tweeters turned out to be bots and a mix of people, including one person in the army (going by his Twitter bio), a software engineer and a student. The software engineer, Satheeshwaran, had tweeted about 1,070 times in the span of three days in the original sample of 700,000 with most of his tweets being retweets.

One of the common traits among the top 10 tweeters was that most of them had far more retweets than tweets. This is an important thing to note -- while people may not be expressing their opinions in their own words, they retweet links and other tweets that they think reinforce their opinions.

The top retweets

The top tweeters are all celebrities who fall into the broad bracket of sports and entertainment. The most retweeted tweet was by Indian cricketer Virender Sehwag, a prolific tweeter with a sense of humour. While his quips do get him quite a few retweets, one of his tweets in Tamil praising the 'wonderful' people of Tamil Nadu and their peaceful form of protest earned him 26,000 retweets. Another top-10 tweet was by actor Mahesh Babu, who called the people of Tamil Nadu 'bold and fearless'. Journalist Sonia Singh's tweet, noting that there was not a single incident of molestation or misconduct of any kind, was retweeted about 9,000 times. Popular radio jockey Balaji Patturaj's video clip arguing why leather is not banned because cows are killed on an industrial scale was retweeted over 9,000 times.

These instances prove beyond doubt that celebrities have a powerful voice on social media and if they take a stand on an issue, it increases people's support base for the same. This is similar to advertising, where getting the celebrity to endorse a product increases the sales; in this case, the product is replaced by a cause.

The Jallikattu case is an example of celebrity power actually turning into on the ground action. At least two examples fortify this hypothesis: One day before the protests, actor Silambarasan Rajendran uploaded a video on Twitter urging people to block key junctions in protest of the ban and at the same time not block access to medical and emergency services. This tweet was retweeted nearly 10,000 times. As the movement gathered momentum, Silambarasan also created a new hashtag called #JallikattuCare and asked people to use it in case they needed anything like food or medical care during the protest.

What words did tweeters use the most?

For this analysis, Python was used to count the occurrence of each word in the tweet sample. This was done after common words like 'and' and 'the' were filtered out. Unsurprisingly, the analysis showed that words like 'Tamil' and 'culture' were most used. There were over a 1,000 mentions of culture, and nearly 2,000 mentions of 'Tamil'.

A deeper look into the tweets showed that several of them appealed to a sense of 'Tamil pride' akin to this piece of research that Donald Trump's supporters were more likely to engage people on several issues on Twitter.

The bottom line

As University of York's David Beer rightly points out on an LSE blog , "...Perhaps the most telling measure was that of ‘amplification’, which was a measure of the generation of activity in the form of responses and shares. This measure can be used to assess the reaction and activity that individuals can provoke." This is true in the case of the Jallikattu tweets. Most of the tweets were retweets or 'amplifications', and hence can be traced back to tweets from influencers like cricketers or actors.

From this, it follows that it pays for journalists to follow activities of celebrities -- faster one can pick up the thread, further one can go down the amplification road.

Social media is fast becoming the indicator of what people are interested in. "Social media gives you a quick and easy way to gauge audience interest. The amount of likes, comments, and shares a post gets can be telling," writes Jess Archer on the MIT news site. In this instance too, following the tag '#jallikattu' can yield several stories on the subject just by looking through a few hundred tweets.

A WIRED article on why people marched worldwide against Donald Trump shows us that Twitter can be used to find out about the issues and concerns of people. In the article, author Heather Whaling says cites Twitter analytics from Cision and says that abortion and healthcare were major concerns of people around the time of the march. In this particular article, saving an age-old tradition and upholding the rights of Tamilians were the major concerns of people. One limitation of Twitter, however, is that it is limited to people who use it, and hence may not be good for an in-depth analysis.

An interesting phenomenon in the jallikattu case was that though the stakeholders are all bull-owning farmers in the rural districts, (where access to internet is limited) it was urban people who took over Twitter and protest venues in the city -- just another indication that though jallikattu cannot reach large cities, Twitter certainly can.